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The Mucho-Married Minard- Miner and Mayle-Male Families

More Than 250 Known Cousin Marriages within the Chestnut Ridge Community of West Virginia and Eastern Ohio

Astoundingly, the generations of descendants of Jacob and Ruth (Adams) Minerd Sr. have intermarried more than 240 known times with the Mayle-Male family of the Chestnut Ridge community of Philippi, Barbour County and Webster, Taylor County, WV. This pages outlines the specific facts of each marriage as best known. Minerd-Miner descendants also intermarried with other Chestnut Ridge families include Croston, Dalton, Kennedy, Newman, Norris and Pritchard, among others.

The Mayle-Male family traces its lineage back in time to John Male and Wilmore Male of Hampshire and Randolph Counties, WV, who were military veterans of the American Revolution. Wilmore's wife, Nancy, was believed to have been the daughter of a black slave of Haitian descent. Nancy was set free in 1826 "on condition that she remains with me during my natural life in the quality of my wife," Wilmore wrote.

In addition to the paper trail of historical facts, scholars have studied the pattern of intermarriages. William Harlan Gilbert Jr.'s piece, "Mixed Bloods of the Upper Monongahela Valley, West Virginia," printed in a 1946 edition of the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, noted the tendency for the families to inter-wed.

In "An Introduction to the Guineas: West Virginia's Melungeons," published in Appalachian Journal in 1973, Avery F. Gaskins noted that most of the families carried a combination of caucasian, black and native American blood. He wrote: "Since the outside world discovered them, they have remained aloof and very intricately intermarried, so that a majority of them bear only a half dozen or so family names."

In fact, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Barry Paris visited Philippi and published a story on New Year's Eve 1984, entitled "Ridge Folks: Heirs to Unceretain Identities." Paris wrote that "The main social feature of the Chestnut Ridge people today is their familial cohesion. All 1,500 of them bear one of less than a dozen surnames. A 1977 survey of obituaries in the Barbour County Democrat showed that 135 of 1963 ridge people -- 83 percent -- were married to people having the same last names -- Mayle, Norris, Croston, Pritchard, Minard, Collins, Adams and Kennedy." He recorded that the community suffered “ 'many instances of profoundly retarded children and a high rate of infant mortality, due to the interbreeding, according to one minister who asked not to be identified. 'I’d say the retardation rate used to be as high as one out of five,' said the clergyman. 'Nowadays, it’s probably more like one out of ten. One woman had four retarded children'.”

In her master's thesis at Marshall University (1979), Dorothy J. Cox initially began to make specific lists of these early connections, and published her findings in A Marginal Group in West Virginia: An Historical and Cultural Study. The late Bernard Mayhle created his own basic lists in his typed publication The Males of West Virginia, which he graciously shared with the founder of this website. Minerd.com has expanded her initial research dramatically to focus on the extensive Minard-Miner family connections with the Mayles and Males.